Theater
The
Capeman
(Marquis Theatre, New York City). The eagerly awaited but
troubled collaboration of singer-songwriter Paul Simon, poet Derek Walcott, and
choreographer Mark Morris is judged to be worse than expected. "It's like
watching a mortally wounded animal," says the New York Times ' Ben
Brantley. Critics say the show, about a Puerto Rican teen gang member and
convicted murderer, fails to make its protagonist sympathetic even as it
moralizes smugly about racism. Simon's score, a combination of salsa and '50s
doo-wop, is singled out for praise. "There's more musical invention in a song
like 'Trailways Bus' than in the entire score of the much ballyhooed
Ragtime ," says
Slate
's Mark Steyn. Sideshow:
Picketers castigated the show for glorifying a killer. (Audio clips are
available here.)
Television
Clinton-Sex-Scandal Coverage. Critics rail against irresponsible
reporting on the scandal but admit that they like watching it. Their main
points: 1) The 24-hour news channels' unremitting coverage made the networks'
nightly broadcasts look "more like dinosaurs than ever" (Bruce Fretts,
Entertainment Weekly ). 2) Because the story's main outline emerged so
fast, it lacked the sustaining drama of Watergate. 3) Matt Drudge and Monica
Lewinsky's lawyer William Ginsburg appeared on too many talk shows,
discrediting themselves as publicity whores. (
Slate
's Jacob
Weisberg has a different take on Ginsburg and the talk-show circuit. Click
here
for his "dispatch" on the subject.) 4) The media's apologies for their
excessive coverage were on target but tiresome. 5) Sam Donaldson, who returned
to ABC's White House beat the week before the scandal, thrives out in the
field, not in the studio.
Dawson's Creek
(The WB; Tuesdays, 9 p.m. ET/PT). The fledgling WB
network hopes that this prime-time teen soap opera, alongside its cult hit
Buffy the Vampire Slayer , will launch it toward Fox-like legitimacy.
Critics scoff. They profess revulsion at such vulgar subplots as a high-school
student's affair with his teacher and a character who masturbates while
watching Katie Couric. "It makes Melrose Place look like Petticoat
Junction ," says Newsweek 's Rick Marin. Reviewers say the show is
long on pop-culture allusions and short on psychological acumen. "My
So-Called Life without the life" (Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly ).
(The WB plugs the show.)
Movies
Great Expectations
(20 th Century Fox). Critics aren't
buying Alfonso Cuarón's transposition of Charles Dickens' 1861 novel to
present-day Florida and New York. It "plays like a dead battery disguised as an
objet d'art " (Jay Carr, the Boston Globe ). They are especially
irked by the movie's artsy pretensions (Pip is turned into a tortured painter)
and earnestness (its un-Dickensian fulminations about undying love), as well as
flat performances by Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow. But Cuarón is praised as
"a voluptuous visual stylist" (Janet Maslin, the New York Times ) who
turns in beautiful shots of beaches and the naked Paltrow. (Click here for the official site.)
Desperate Measures
(TriStar Pictures). Michael Keaton is said to
waste an intense performance on a silly film. He plays a psychotic murderer
hunted by a cop (Andy Garcia) who needs Keaton's bone marrow to save his dying
son. Aside from an absurd premise that "most TV medical dramas would wrap up in
20 minutes" (Susan Wloszczyna, USA Today ), the film is riddled with
overwrought hospital scenes and numbing car chases--"clichés that mount like
fallen bricks" (Jack Mathews, the Los Angeles Times ).
Books
Cuba
Libre
, by Elmore Leonard (Delacorte). Acclaim for the pulp-fiction
writer's 34 th novel. Set in Cuba during the Spanish-American war,
the novel is part Western (the main character, Ben Tyler, is an Arizona cowboy)
and part noir (he's in on an arms-smuggling scam gone bad). The book is said to
display Leonard's usual "flair for characters and capers" (Henry Louis Gates,
The New Yorker ) and period detail. Dissenting in the New York Times
Book Review , Pico Iyer finds Cuba Libre vapid: "The central moral
question raised ... is whether Tyler should be played by Val Kilmer or Brad
Pitt."
The
House Gun
, by Nadine Gordimer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The Nobel
Prize-winning novelist produces a clunker: Critics say she's stuck in
pre-democratic South Africa. "She has yet to come to terms, artistically ...
with her country's drastically changed landscape" (Michiko Kakutani, the New
York Times ). Tired harangues about capital punishment and gun control are
said to come at the expense of developing her characters, who "don't behave
like humans" (Carolyn See, the Washington Post ). Others pay the
customary obeisance to Gordimer's nuanced depiction of morally confused white
liberals, in this case an older couple whose son is accused of murder.
Recent
"Summary Judgment" columns
Jan.
28:
Movie -- Wag the
Dog ;
Movie -- Gingerbread
Man ;
Movie -- Spice
World ;
Book -- Birthday
Letters , by Ted Hughes;
Book -- Night
Train , by Martin Amis;
Book -- Enduring
Love , by Ian McEwan;
Event --Super Bowl
XXXII;
Dance --"Mikhail Baryshnikov: An Evening of Music and Dance With the
White Oak Chamber Ensemble."
Jan.
21:
Movie -- Fallen ;
Movie --Sundance Film
Festival;
Movie -- Live
Flesh ;
Musical -- Ragtime ;
Book -- Pillar of
Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65 , by Taylor Branch;
Book -- Shadows on
the Hudson , by Isaac Bashevis Singer;
Television -- South
Park (Comedy Central);
Art --"Arthur Dove: A Retrospective" (Whitney Museum).
Jan.
14:
Death --Sonny
Bono;
Book -- A Prayer for
the City , by Buzz Bissinger;
Book -- Cold
Mountain , by Charles Frazier;
Book -- The World
According to Peter Drucker , by Jack Beatty;
Movie -- Afterglow ;
Movie -- Arguing the
World ;
Movie -- Ma Vie en Rose .
Jan.
7:
Movie -- The
Apostle ;
Movie -- Oscar and
Lucinda ;
Movie -- The
Boxer ;
Television -- Seinfeld (NBC);
Book -- Truman
Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall
His Turbulent Career , by George Plimpton;
Book -- Paradise , by Toni Morrison;
Music --"Northern
Lights: The Music of Jean Sibelius."
--Franklin Foer
